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Tobacco poison surrounds child workers

The children pick through mountainous piles of waste tobacco and sweep it up with their bare hands into giant bags in the hope of scraping a living. From behind a veil of dust, they stare back at us with bloodshot eyes.

As the wind gathers in a fading dusk, infant siblings strapped to their mothers' backs wail amid swirling, noxious clouds of tobacco.

Beyond them, a parched maize plantation stretches into the distance towards the factory buildings of Alliance One, the world's largest tobacco processor and the source of up to 30% of the premium tobacco enjoyed by Britain's 13m smokers.

A Sunday Times investigation in the southern African state of Malawi has uncovered an environmental travesty that is being inflicted by the tobacco industry on some of the continent's poorest people.

Downstream from the tobacco processing plants that dominate the outskirts of Lilongwe, the Malawian capital, rivers run yellow